Wine & Spirits - June 2020 - 34

"Do you eat sweatbreads?" Iturriaga asks, passing a
cazuela brimming with mollejitas and golden garlic scapes.
Then the chef carries out a cazuela with roasted kidneys,
which Iturriaga holds up for his guest, raising his eyebrows.
"This is the only place I eat kidneys," he assures me. And it
is soon deliciously clear why that might be.
Alvarez, a quiet Basque from Bilboa, is bemused by the
show. "When I was growing up, we ate lechazo only at Christmas," he says. "Now, people eat it any day." He gestures
toward the kitchen door where Marco Antonio is emerging
with a stainless-steel cart and two cazuelas of lechazo. "It's
like dim-sum service," Alvarez says. Then he reaches under
the table to his bag, and pulls out a bottle of 2014 DRC La
Tâche to hand to the sommelier. And though I initially wonder why Alvarez would pour this wine in the company of his
own 1996 Unico, it's soon clear that no matter the ethereal
beauty and underlying strength of La Tâche, the mysterious powers of Unico reign here in the land of lechazo. There
is something mystical in the way the lechazo melts into a
memory of texture and a whisper of gamey flavor, only to be
resurrected by the dark energy of the Unico, the two lasting
together in some ancient form of marriage.

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2020

T
GOYO GARCIA VIADERO
PREPARES CHULETAS DE
LECHAZO FOR GRILLING
OVER VINE CUTTINGS.

hat evening, in the twilight of Gumiel del Mercado, a hilltown to the northeast, Goyo García Viadero meets us at the door of his cellars.
The building had been in ruins when García
Viadero bought it, the roof and several walls
caved in, the elm beam that spanned the room
deteriorated. He has since rebuilt the walls and
roof to look like a clean version of what they
may once, originally, have been, their limestone rock in random shapes and sizes, the
beam restored to lift the stone press that rests beneath a
giant wooden screw. But this is just an anteroom, the public
space that leads from his vineyards, in the northern hills of
Ribera del Duero, into the cellars below.
He is in no rush to head down the cellar stairs, a narrow
passage walled in the same random limestone blocks, with
stone stairs and a peaked stone arch giving the stairway a
sense of entering an empty niche in the wall of a church, a
Catholic rabbit hole both ancient and a little psychotropically twisted as the stairs increase in depth with each step
and the stone arch turns in a gentle meander as it progresses
further and further into the earth.
The narrow tunnels of the caves are lined with barrels, the walls breathing moisture through their sandy
limestone grit. The 20th century bypassed these cellars,
as, it seems, the 21st may as well. They are now home to
the fruit of ancient vines, parcels García Viadero acquired
when he returned to Ribera del Duero after 14 years in
La Mancha. He's known here as Goyo, to distinguish his
wines from his family's at their modern Bodegas Valduero,
where his sister Yolanda oversees 495 acres of bush vines
planted in the late 1980s, around the time he decamped.
Goyo took a different path, fascinated from a young age
by the traditional wines of the region. He still has bottles
he made when he was 21 years old, in 1986, from old vines
using no added sulfur. When he returned in 2003, it was
the peak of the trend toward new oak and hyperextraction,
powerful wines built to compete in the international market. "I didn't like the wine people were making in Ribera,"
he explains. "I thought we must return to the past."
He set out to grow his vines in the tradition of the region,
often as field blends of tempranillo with albillo, a white
grape, the varieties cofermented without any additions,
aging them for three years in old French oak barrels in his
deep, limestone caves.
"We don't use any sulfites, so three years in barrel can be
very difficult," he says as he thieves tastes for his wife and
fellow winemaker, Diana Semova Geogieva, as well as for
longtime W&S contributor Patricio Tapia, who is here with
me in Ribera del Duero.
Though I had cajoled Goyo to take us to his favorite spot
for lechazo, he insisted on preparing it at his own cellars.
Back upstairs, while he tends the fire in a massive stone
hearth, he cops to the fact that, in La Mancha, he had been
in charge of a flock of 2,500 sheep. So, he knows, intimately,
how it was possible to serve baby lamb all year round.
"Normally, there were two moments in the year when
you could eat lechazo-in summer and in winter. The
female sheep were interested in mating in spring and
autumn." On market days, people in Burgos would come
to town for their supplies, then stop for a meal, and that
would be lechazo. "Now, there are many opportunities to

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